that had yet been brought forward in favor of the Disestablishment of
Church, was, he thought, to assume a great deal too much. The Church
that had survived Wesley, Whitefield, Colenso, Darwin, and Renan would
not succumb to George Holland. The bishop recollected how the Church had
bitterly opposed all the teaching of the men of wisdom whose names came
back to him; and how it had ended by making their teaching its own.
Would anyone venture to assert that the progress of Christianity was
dependent upon what people thought of the acceptance by David of the
therapeutic course prescribed for him? Was the morality which the Church
preached likely to be jeopardized because Ruth was a tricky young woman?

The bishop knew something of man, and he knew something of the Church,
he even knew something of the Bible; and when he came to the chapter
in "Revised Versions" that dealt with the episode of Ruth and Boaz, he
flung the book into a corner of his bedroom, exclaiming, "Puppy!"

And then there came before his eyes a vision of a field of yellow corn,
ripe for the harvest. The golden sunlight gleamed upon the golden
grain through which the half-naked brown-skinned men walked with their
sickles. The half-naked brown-skinned women followed the binders,
gleaning the ears, and among the women was the one who had said,
"Entreat me not to leave thee." He had read that old pastoral when
he was a child at the knee of his mother. It was surely the loveliest
pastoral of the East, and its charm would be in no wise impaired because
a man who failed to appreciate the beauty of its simplicity, had almost
called Ruth by the worst name that can be applied to a woman.

The bishop did not mind what George Holland called Abraham, or Isaac, or
Jacob, or Samson, but Ruth--to say that Ruth----